On Error

In Japan, I once had a class comprised of four young ladies who had just finished college and were working towards their Mrs. degrees. They were sweet, pleasant girls who spoke passable English, but they all had the same fault: they hated making mistakes. Their compositions reflected this: their prose was painfully accurate and unadventurous, meticulously penned in copperplate. Every sentence carefully followed the subject-verb-object formula. They took no risks -- and they bored me half to tears.

I used to dread marking their compositions, which invariably went like this:

I went to my friend's house on Saturday. We played tennis. We had a lunch at Bon Appetit. We went for a drive in Den-en-chofu. We enjoyed ourselves very much. I went home. I helped my mother in the kitchen. I did my homework. Then, I went to bed.

One day another student joined this class. Fumiko was a young housewife, the mother of two small children, and a real breath of fresh air. Every day she came into class with funny stories about her family. She rolled her eyes and giggled as she told us about squabbles and skinned knees, and her English was atrocious, but creative and wonderfully communicative. Her compositions were almost too ambitious, but they never once bored me. She obviously worked with a dictionary, and she was a firm believer in incorporating English proverbs into her prose.

Whenever I sat down to mark Fumiko's English journal -- which she turned in to me on a weekly basis -- I reached for the aspirin. You could tell that she had scrawled her entries at the kitchen table: there were spots of grease, ketchup, and soy sauce on the pages, and Fumiko's handwriting was nowhere near as neat and precise as her classmates'. But I always marveled at her creative, adventurous use of English and I laughed myself silly at her humor, both accidental and intentional:

I am tell husband finishing homeworks when after dinner is finished eating. His thinks everytime after finishing dinner doing nothing because man's job allready finished. I am tell my jobs never finished. When woman becomes mother, all labor increases: Putting one's baby to breast, cooking dinner's preparations, and clean floor's. I say him "You come home as work is finished but I have homeworks even sleep time!!" We disputing all day long, again and again. A man will work from sun to sun, but woman's work is never done!

When Fumiko got her compositions back, I could see her classmates glancing from their virtually unmarked sheets to hers, on which I had always written plenty of comments. I could read quiet victory in their eyes: Look, our compositions are perfect, but Fumiko has made so many errors!

Fumiko didn't seem to mind what the others thought. She stayed after class when she could and asked me endless questions about grammar, syntax, vocabulary, and colloquialisms. She brought her Japanese-English proverbs dictionaries to class and we would pore over them together, trying to find the proverbs which were the most contemporary and useful. Proverbs are used more often in Japanese than they are in English and I had my work cut out for me convincing Fumiko that it was possible to overdo it with proverbs in English. Still, after a while I could see the value of having some of the more structurally accurate, commonly used English proverbs at the tip of your tongue. But even as I managed to convince her that proverbs weren't always useful in English, she managed to persuade me that they were useful in Japanese; I began to see that even the tritest cliches could contain pearls of wisdom. In fact, through Fumiko, I got hooked on Japanese proverbs. And a year later, Fumiko's English had vastly improved while the others had made only modest progress. Cliche though it is, Fumiko had truly learned from her mistakes.

I learned from her mistakes too. And although there were occasions when I wondered what in the world she was talking about, Fumiko became my role model when I started writing Japanese in earnest. I took risks; I was adventurous; I put my all into my compositions, resigned myself to making the occasional howler, and pored over my teacher's painstaking corrections and explanations.

And I bought an entire series of Japanese proverb books and dictionaries, and learned dozens of them. To this day I can still bore my kids by reciting the appropriate proverb when the occasion demands, and they've even learned some themselves.

So thank you, Fumiko. Thank you for showing me such a good example. Thank you for hours of entertainment, and who cares about the headaches? And thank you very much for getting me hooked on proverbs. 七転び八起き Nana korobi, ya oki, or Fall down seven times, get up eight. (If at first you don't succeed, try, try again.)

A real pearl of wisdom, that. And it's come in handy for a lot more than language learning.